Accessibility Review Report or IRA Report

Thanks to the famous Digital Kit, the Accessibility Review Report (IRA) has become a recurring topic of conversation between digitizing agents and consultants or experts in Web Accessibility.

But, although it may seem so, this Accessibility Review Report is not something new, since it has existed since before 2020.

The purpose of this report is to assess whether or not the degree of accessibility necessary for the public sector is met: web pages, applications, documents, etc. That is, everything you make from the Digital Kit.

This report is directly related to the mandatory accessibility requirements that exist for the public sector and that must be met in their web pages, applications, documents …

What is the Accessibility Review Report (IRA)?

An accessibility review report is a document that helps us evaluate the accessibility of a website, application or digital content according to WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines). Simplifying, the report is an Excel in which the degree of compliance with the conformity criteria is noted and when it is complete it offers us a vision of the degree of accessibility of that website.

Although it is sometimes thought that the accessibility review report

helps us comply with the requirements or current legislation on accessibility, it is not, what helps us is to audit

this in an orderly manner.

How do I make an accessibility review report?

Filling out an accessibility review report is not overly complex, but it is something that could be called “heavy lifting”, or tedious.

To fill in the report you have to select the representative pages of the web and evaluate in each of those pages the 50 criteria of conformity, if we want to achieve a level of accessibility AA.

What can be complicated is to analyze those 50 criteria, since this requires in-depth knowledge of the WCAG and also have experience with the review, combine manual and automatic evaluations, and then propose ways to solve or correct the problems detected.

By the way, I recommend you read the post
WCAG 2.1 accessibility: what you need to know to make your website or app accessible
for more information about WCAG 2.1

What types of accessibility issues are addressed in an accessibility review report?

Actually, the accessibility review report helps us to detect any type of accessibility problem, since it includes all the compliance criteria, although the most frequent problems that we usually find (among others) are:

• Lack of contrast
• Inappropriate labels
• Lack of text alternatives for images and multimedia
• Poor navigation and structure

Where do I find the accessibility review report?

The accessibility review report can be found on the website of the Portal of Electronic Administration in accessibility reviews

and from there you can download it in ODS or XLSX format, whichever is more comfortable for you.

In addition to the template to fill out the report you can find a lot of useful information on this topic, including an infographic with the options to generate the accessibility review report.

In summary, not to delve much deeper into the subject, the accessibility review report is a very useful tool that you have to know how to use and that, in addition, does not serve only to justify the digital kit (although it is now fashionable for this reason).

But beyond its usefulness, the important thing is that it is clear to us that to fill it out correctly you have to have solid knowledge about the WCAG guidelines, about how to evaluate them and, above all, know that this is not something that we can do “in a while”, that it takes time and that it is different for each page.

To close the issue and its relationship with the digital kit, simply comment that, as I said at the beginning, all websites, financed with public money, have to comply with AA accessibility standards. One of the requirements to justify that the websites of the digital kit, financed with public money, is to deliver this report, something that seems logical and necessary to me personally.

If this is the first time you face the accessibility review report, from Pasiona we can lend you a hand. From completing the report itself, or even if you need training or advice on the subject. Contact us and we will talk about it.